Documenting the Now

Theoretical Bricolage



Ed Summers / @edsu
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

bit.ly/docnow-bricolage

Goals

  • Dataset
  • Application
  • Community

Dataset

… the cause of social justice has been a topic of discussion on various archival fronts for at least 40 years. If the birth of the modern Western archival profession occurred in 1898 with the publication of the Dutch Manual, then the field has been tackling various aspects of social justice issues for nearly half of its modern history. With this trajectory, we believe that the conversation will continue in years to come.

Punzalan & Caswell (2016)

Without focusing on the first week of the Ferguson network and further unpacking the network by day, we would not have been able to see the important influence of key crowdsourced elites and members of American counterpublics. In particular, our data spotlight the discursive labor of initiators and other influential everyday citizens, most of whom were young and/or African- American, who pushed the larger public sphere to address what happened to Michael Brown and offered ideological interpretations of Brown’s death and resulting events firmly situated in minority experiences with state oppression.

Jackson & Foucault Welles (2015)

Application

What is important is that access to information about how this part of the platform works creates the possibility for the individual to make a choice. Choice creates the possibility for the expression of informational power. These possibilities are closed off when users do not have the basis of informational power from which to enter these fields of action.

Proferes (2016)

Community

We cannot ethically continue to conceive of our primary users as academic scholars; survivors of human rights abuse and victims’ families use records, community members use records. We need to build policies, procedures, and services with these users in mind, but even more so, we need to shift our affective orientations in service to these users.

Caswell & Cifor (2016)

Advisory Board
Desiree Jones-Smith Dan Chudnov Alexandra Dolan-Mescal Francis Kayiwa Chris Freeland Bergis Jules Ed Summers

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